The novel 'Crimes of a Guilty Land' follows the Hart and Beauchamp families through some turbulent years of the nineteenth century. It opens in the summer of 1825 when young Roger Hart, while enjoying his first visit to the beach in Rhode Island, witnesses a tragedy. The events of that day will haunt him for the rest of his life. Many years later, just prior to the Civil War, Roger Hart becomes involved in a risky undertaking to begin to teach the children of slave families in Virginia. That experience leads him to Harpers Ferry and the disastrous John Brown raid on the US Armory in 1859. There he meets the Beauchamp family who became involved in the John Brown affair with tragic results. The Hart and Beauchamp families find themselves bound together with romance and violence as the Civil War devastates the town of Harpers Ferry and as family members find themselves caught up in the Petersbug Battle of the Crater. Both of the families also become involved with a freed slave family that includes a young boy named Brownie.Ten years after the war, Roger finds himself describing all of those events to a curious Brownie. Brownie is anxious to hear his family's story while Hart is determined to pass on to the boy a sense of goodness and a respect for tolerance along with the need for an education. Hart succeeds, and Brownie grows to become a highly regarded teacher.The reader first meets Brownie as he looks back on his life. It is 1941 and America is at war again. But for Brownie, now a retired teacher in West Virginia, an old struggle is still being waged in this country as he witnesses the continued indignity and cruelty of segregation. A moment of violence causes him to reflect on his own life experience and he is drawn to write down his remembrances of his family's involvement in the struggles during the final years of slavery, the John Brown raid at Harpers Ferry, and then the Civil War and its aftermath. He reflects on how his family has experienced drama and tragedy as well as romance and humor during encounters with intolerance - including racial, religious and economic. Brownie recalls the last words of John Brown as he went to the executioner's gallows. Brown wrote on a slip of paper that "...the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." But after so much blood shed over so many years, Brownie is led to question how much progress has been made during his life time, and then on what a seventy five year old man might be able to contribute to changing things.
